"alone" by american-canadian rock band heart as performed by kristin chenoweth on glee
Walking around the elevated track at the gym with elbows out feuding with men in track suits twice my age (the tracksuits, that is. the men are even older.) who hog the lanes and thinking all the time of hair mousse, which makes my curls hard and I know I’m not to touch them and I touch them and they crunch and this largely defeats the purpose of having used the mousse in the first place, baseball, which ensnares me against my better judgment and holds captive my heart, beer, which gives me heartburn, crying, which makes my eyes swell, cheap brown shoes, which make my feet bleed. reading, making tea, an ice cube tracing the lines of my face. I am so inclined to be woebegone that sometimes on a perfectly easy morning with time to myself and the choice of how to spend it still my mind winds around to pushing around in my brain in my ribs for tender spots to pulse and go inside of to feel bad and I notice this and let it happen while I’m walking but when I shower and I make the water cold at the finish and when I lurch away once I go back in and when I lurch away twice I pull my head under the spray and the third time I leap back I’m happy and I can leave.
So anyway here is me with cheese fries.
My girlfriend is out of town, and I am fantasizing about hours from now when the sun is down and work is over and I am ensconced in our little apartment alone and giving the whole of Friday night to cleaning while listening to some twinkly 2010s playlist on which I’d not subject her to and wearing a big old shirt. A greedy coveter of solitude, falling in love and moving in with that love and being in love as an act and lifestyle at all times forever (for three years) has been a fascinating excursion through the forest of human possibility. While yes okay before I have known love and companionship with friends and family and even with people I’ve fucked and would today cross the street to avoid and I have been lucky to take pleasure in the company of others all throughout my life I’d never known anyone I like being around even more than I like being alone. It seemed sort of obvious to me, with no great sadness, really, that I never would. I’m not a loner. I like people. I love to fucking yap. But aloneness to me has always meant—in a manner of speaking—a yapping without end. The freedom to swim around in the great pools of my stupid and endless imaginings. Hours spent tumbling around in my own skull are nothing short of sensual, edifying, as soothing as warm milk when I wish that and, alternately, rather rousing. I pace.
This is to say it has been a seminar on just how little I know about myself or anything else in the world to live with my perfect girl and to hurry home each day from work and to want only that and all the time. I was selfishly sorry she’d be gone and it took, as it takes, barely a night to remember how I like the play-acted thrill of moving unseen, even when the moving is drinking ice water on the couch with thick moisturizer on and doing planks during stressful at bats. I am enjoying my little vacation from real life and I miss real life. In our day to day, I never itch for moments on my own. Our companionable hours together ask for nothing which could ever compare to all they give me and I’m lucky and it is an honor to be skin to skin talking over Top Chef. But then, sometimes, you bathe at midnight and eat dinner standing up and its crackers scooping cold stew and you’re thinking of many nothings and no one knows. I’ll be glad when I unlock the door today to curious darkness and gladder when Megan is home.
Fucking sobbed my guts out at that wedding last week, by the way. Very good stuff. It was a beautiful day and then it hailed and, much later, much drunker, having taken to the streets when the reception shut down, we danced to a toothless bar band’s rendition of “I’m a Believer” from Shrek. Living is so wonderful because it’s terrible too. There are days I think this is the only lesson available to be learned. Over and over, still, trying, fucking up, quitting and starting we learn it.
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